Brexit: Acquired Rights (EUC Report)

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and her committee on an excellent report on this most challenging of Brexit subjects. I hope she does not feel that the Government’s recent and generous offer on safeguarding the position of EU nationals living in this country has in any way stolen her thunder; it is but the opening—I hesitate to say—shot in the UK’s negotiations. I, too, wish the offer had been able to have been made sooner.

It is a generous first offer, even if it does not go all the way to continuing the freedom of movement that many in this House sought for the 510 million EU citizens. Instead, it extends the ability to apply for settled status to the 3.2 million already living in the UK on 29 March, including access to benefits, pensions, education and healthcare for them and their dependents. As the noble Baroness suggested, there are many important issues still to be resolved.

The overarching challenge is how to agree a deal that is both fair and reasonable. When the Maastricht treaty introduced the concept of European citizenship, few envisaged that millions of people would wish to travel to one European country and settle there. Indeed, for many member states this would have been impossible under communism. But the population of the UK has risen by 5.6 million in the past 11 years and has been estimated by Migration Watch to rise a further 5 million to 70 million by 2025, although only some of this increase represents movement here from EU countries.

We have always been an outward-looking nation, welcoming and in the early days even seeking immigrants, who have in turn contributed to the richness of our cultural life and the wealth of our businesses. More recently, our public services simply could not have functioned without the excellent professionals who have chosen to live here. The same is true of many other industries, including building and tourism. So immigration is, has been and will continue to be a good thing for the United Kingdom post Brexit. Most of us will continue to feel European after Brexit, even if we do not see our identity defined as being part of a political structure called the EU. But there must be a tipping point at which uncontrolled immigration just puts too much stress on our public services, housing stock, jobs and public finances. If that leads to resentment, acts of xenophobia, as identified in the committee’s report, and community unrest, it will risk much of what successive Governments have achieved in creating the vibrant, multicultural society we live in.

By all means, let us construct a very generous offer to EU citizens living in the UK. Equally, let us construct an attractive route to UK residence for those whose services or businesses we decide we need in the future, either by quotas, permits or other means. We have a long way to go in our negotiations for defining and ensuring reciprocal rights. What is proving to be even more challenging is deciding how those rights can be safeguarded in the future.

If we are to regain fully our judicial sovereignty, then there can be no role for the European Court of Justice—a scenario which is unacceptable to the EU. There surely can therefore be only one solution, which is for an independent court or tribunal to act as a binding arbiter. As with many matters during these complex negotiations, a compromise will be required. This will need to reflect the competing desires of a United Kingdom that wishes to regain control over judicial matters and the need to provide certainty to those EU citizens whom we wish to continue living and working here. As the report suggests, there is both a moral and an economic case that the sooner this happens the better.